How to Make Herself Agreeable to Everyone: A Memoir

And the ability to disassociate is also what made me successful: Without my own emotion getting in the way, the audience could find room for their own response.

To avoid abusive power means deciding that the power of these men isn’t something we want,[4] isn’t something that can make our lives better, or more just, or more sustainable. And when I work for them, I am participating, exploiting those further down the ladder.

James Baldwin quote: “The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.”[5]

Scientists say suppressing the expression of an emotion can reduce the feeling itself.[23] In a study published in The Journal of Pain, subjects who were told not to frown experienced less pain than those who grimaced when heat was applied to their arm. However: “People who tend to do this regularly might start to see the world in a more negative l

so I stop and wonder how to be inside an afternoon with no demands, no work, no one else to please.

In Michelle Cliff’s “Notes on Speechlessness” she writes, “Speechlessness involves self-denial…to choose to express/to choose to express anger.”[1] I add in the margin: “and for me, to choose to express joy/to choose to feel/to choose to feel pleasure,” because both disappeared when language disappeared. I neglected life-sustaining joy because surv

I worry that when I do not explain exactly where my income and my voice come from, I am helping export the American myth, the one that promises opportunity while it promotes hierarchy.[8]

I am being paid to be disposable, to sell clothes that are disposable, to sell something I have no right to sell, to be someone I dislike, to be uncomfortable, until I can no longer see my whole self because I also see what they see and give it willingly.

“The process of making art,” writes Rebecca Solnit, “is the process of becoming a person with agency, with independent thought, a producer of meaning rather than a consumer of meanings that may be at odds with your soul, your destiny, your humanity.”[2]